A Small History
by Rachel Indeed
Summary: Sarah thinks of home.  The Doctor listens.  4th Doctor, Sarah


Author's Note: I wrote this years ago, actually, but thought about it today when I heard the news about Elisabeth Sladen. She will always have a piece of my heart, and the Doctor's.

Disclaimer: Sarah and the Doctor and the TARDIS are not mine. I just love them.

**A Small History**

_"…If poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake." – Robert Penn Warren_  
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"Tell me about South Croydon, Sarah."

It was an odd request. The very subject of South Croydon was somewhat taboo aboard the TARDIS these days – both the Doctor and his companion seemed to tacitly agree that the less said about it the better. After all, if the locale arose in conversation then it was usually necessary to try and go there, or at any rate to go through the motions, or at the very least to come up with some new excuse. And after two years those excuses were wearing thin. Thank goodness for the time machine's temperamental navigational system – it was always there to take the blame for the latest overshoot, bypass, or temporal disruption.

The Doctor had told Sarah several times that the TARDIS was psychically sensitive to its owner, and perhaps to its longtime residents as well. She (privately) felt that this explained a lot. The Doctor never deliberately mistyped the coordinates when he offered to take her home – she saw him enter them each time – but so far the unspoken negative vibrations accompanying this order had always been strong enough to nudge the obliging TARDIS into another malfunction. _This ship always knows what we really want_, Sarah thought fondly, _even when we're a bit confused about it ourselves_. That was the secret, she supposed, behind her repeated decisions to trust her return to a machine that had proven itself unreliable time and again. Deep down, she'd come to believe that if she ever truly needed to reach her own time and place, the TARDIS would manage it. For now, she was just where she wanted to be.

But that didn't keep her from getting homesick and nostalgic at times. Normally the Doctor refused to indulge these weaknesses of hers, ignoring her outbursts and cheerfully drowning out her reminiscences with stories of his own. Not today, though. Instead here he was, inviting her to air the forbidden subject and addressing her with something approaching his full attention; eighty percent at the very least. _He must actually be feeling a bit __**guilty**__ about this last trip_, she marveled ruefully, peeling away the last charred tatters of her right sleeve and wincing as she pasted some of the cold antiseptic cream over her burn. He kept his medicines in the bottom left-hand cabinet of the purple washroom, and she'd never seen him touch the stuff himself. She'd stumbled across this particular tube six months after her first voyage, and she'd kept it handy ever since.

She glanced up with a slight smile to show him it wasn't serious; she knew that his habitual nonchalance was always thrown off when she brought home a physical injury. She was regularly mentally and emotionally distressed, and they were both used to shrugging off such episodes as soon as the immediate danger passed – after all, space adventures were not for the faint of heart. No use crying over spilt milk; and besides, she was seeing and doing more than any human had a right to expect, and if that meant being terrified from time to time, well, thems the breaks. But there was something about flesh wounds, however superficial, that got to him every time. They left a mark. They were harder to dismiss.

Hence sympathy and the open ear. "South Croydon?" she echoed, leaning back to let her elbows rest against the wooden railing and tossing the medicine tube onto the nearest chair. She took in his posture: he was slouched in what looked like a thoroughly uncomfortable wooden chair, eyes averted, legs sprawled out and fingers lazily fiddling with his scarf. A serious, wistful response from her would only push him into active moping, whereas if she laughed at him he would probably snap back to normal and abandon this fledgling foray into empathy. She shrugged, then did her duty. "Oh, it's nothing special. Just a late twentieth-century town, I suppose. It rains cupcakes on Sundays and the houses turn to gingerbread on Christmas Eve, but other than that..."

"You awful liar," he said without looking up. He was using his 'amused' monotone.

"Mmmm," she replied non-committally. "Don't believe me?"

"Not a word." She nodded approvingly and turned to head back to her room.

He surprised her. "Especially that 'nothing special' bit."

She stopped in the doorway. "You're serious? You really want to hear about it?"

"Well, why not?" he answered, dragging out the syllables playfully. "It'll pass the time, expand the mind. That's practically my motto." He grinned disarmingly. She eyed him for a moment.

"I think you just don't want me to leave you alone, because then you'd have to fix the second dimension capacitor."

"Rubbish!" He sat upright in his chair, snatching off his hat and beginning an aggrieved soliloquy. "I'll have you know that I've been _looking forward _to repairing that for the last..."

"All right, all right!" she said, raising her arms in mock surrender and walking towards the chair opposite him. "Just so long as we know where we stand," she grinned, and sat. Grudgingly he slouched back into his seat.

"I'm not sure what is so special about it, really," she began. "I mean, there are lovely parks there, and old Victorian houses with ivy and stone and _character_, not the shoeboxes you see in London nowadays. My house is on Hillview Road, a little brownstone thing, and you can watch the sunset through the dining room window. My aunt and uncle live two blocks away in the house I grew up in. I can pop over for tea and drink it from the cup I chipped and then hid on the patio when I was six years old." She shook her head. "It's very normal and small and...human, I suppose. It's where my memories are. It's where my auntie lives, and where my parents are buried. It's home."

She hadn't meant to go on so long – she glanced over at the Doctor, half expecting him to be crouched over some console tuning her out. But he was still in the chair, eyes closed, with the slightest of smiles at one corner of his mouth. He lifted his eyelids a crack. "It sounds quite nice, Sarah."

"It's lovely," she agreed, then straightened herself up. She didn't want to send the wrong message here. "But that's the nice thing about lovely places; they were there before you and they'll be just the same after you. South Croydon's ticking along just fine at this moment, I expect. So I'm in no hurry...I'll get there eventually. It's kind of like you and Gallifrey. It's home and it's lovely and it's where you'll end up," she ignored his snort of derision, "but...not today. Definitely not today."

"Never today," the Doctor shuddered, leaning farther back into his chair and covering his face with the green fedora. "That's my motto, too."

"Don't I know it. If you could just work 'jelly babies' in there somewhere it'd be about right. Let's see..." She leaned back in her own chair, letting herself finally truly relax. They had a few hours at least before their next landing. She thought for a moment. "How about: 'Never eat the jelly baby today; it might expand the mind, or at least pass the time, of somebody else tomorrow?'"

"Too long," the verdict came through the hat. "Mottos should be pithy. And besides, there's no word in Latin for 'jelly baby.'"

"Who said anything about Latin? Do it in Gallifreyan."

He lifted the hat to honor her with a disapproving stare. "Believe it or not," he said slowly, as if talking to a child, "there's no word for 'jelly baby' in Gallifreyan either. I had to introduce the concept, nomenclature and cuisine at a go; I imported them straight from London. I'm hoping they'll catch on eventually. Otherwise I shall regard Gallifrey as neither lovely nor my home."

"Isn't that how you regard it now?"

"Technically. But I'll give them a few centuries to come round."

A minute's peaceful silence passed. When she'd first known him, the Doctor's capacity to sit in near catatonia had disconcerted her. But at this point, the quiet was companionable.

She smiled. "I've got it – 'Don't Tread On Me,' with the scarf as banner?"

He didn't dignify that one with a response.

A few minutes later, "'Always Do What You're Best At?'"

Nothing. Ah, well. No winner today.

The sound of his regular breathing through the hat convinced her that he'd drifted off, although how he'd managed to do so in such an uncomfortable position was beyond her. Silently she padded over to the wall, switched off the overhead light, and headed for her own room.

Just as she reached the corridor, she heard from the darkness behind her, "Thank you, Sarah."

His unspoken _for everything_ was understood.

"You're welcome."

"I'll remember," he added. "About Hillview Road."

She believed him. "As well you should. Goodnight, Doctor." She shuffled down the hall.

"Goodnight."


End file.
